Items tagged with Flash

The television may not be what it once was for a mainstay like Toshiba, but the company's still investing in other growth areas. Just this week, it announced plans to plow 200 billion yen (around $1.9 billion) into its chip business beyond the current year. The outfit's CEO, Hisao Tanaka, confessed as much during an opening ceremony surrounding its chip fabrication plant in Yokkaichi, Japan. In case the financial sum wasn't a clue, Tanaka said that "boosting sales and profits" in the company's semiconductor unit was being made an even greater priority than becoming the world's leader in NAND flash...Read more...

AMD is launching a new family of products today, but unless you follow the rumor mill pretty closely, it’s probably not something you’d expect. It’s not a new CPU or APU. And it’s not a new GPU or memory kit either. Well then, “what could it be” you ask? Today, AMD is launching its first line of solid state drives (SSDs), targeted squarely at AMD enthusiasts. Whodathunkit? AMD is calling the new family of drives, the Radeon R7 Series SSD, similar to its popular mid-range line of graphics cards. The new Radeon R7 Series SSDs feature OCZ and Toshiba technology,...Read more...

Adobe has today released an updated version of its Flash plugin to address "critical" issues, and believe us when we say that no time should be wasted in making sure you get that up-to-date version. At the core, this bug could result in remote code execution being possible, which is to say that somebody could potentially run malicious code on your PC, or ultimately take control of it. This vulnerability was discovered by Google security researcher Michele Spagnuolo and a tool called Rosetta Flash. This tool has the ability to translate a standard SWF Flash file into standard alphanumeric characters,...Read more...

Seagate announced that it has acquired LSI’s Accelerated Solutions Division (ASD) and Flash Components Division (FCD) from parent Avago for $450 million in cash. What Seagate is getting is a nice big pile of enterprise PCIe-based flash and SSD controller technologies that will allow it to push harder into the enterprise storage space. “Seagate is committed to providing our customers with a complete range of storage solutions, and this acquisition will significantly enhance our flash storage offerings to supplement our existing portfolio,” said Steve Luczo, Seagate chairman and...Read more...

When SSDs hit the market, it was a revolution in terms of storage speeds, unlocking a serious performance bottleneck over slower (but generally higher-capacity and much less expensive HDDs), but a team of Japanese researchers has developed technology that could significantly boost SSD performance while also making NAND flash-based devices more energy efficient. Specifically, the research team has run simulations that improves write speeds by 300%; reduces power consumption by 60%; and decreases write/erase cycles by 55%. Even better, because the solution is in the SSD’s middleware and not...Read more...

A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded performance and competitive pricing. Well, today, another major player—ADATA—is releasing its own family of drives featuring similar technology at its core. The brand new ADATA SP920 Premiere Pro family of drives we’ll be showing you...Read more...

A few weeks back, we took a look at a new series of solid state drives from Crucial, the M550, which leveraged Marvell controller technology, 20nm MLC NAND flash memory, and firmware optimizations gleaned from the last couple of years of SATA SSD advancements. Ultimately, we found the M550 series of drives to be solid offerings, with well-rounded performance and competitive pricing. Well, today, another major player—ADATA—is releasing its own family of drives featuring similar technology at its core. The brand new ADATA SP920 Premiere Pro family of drives we’ll be showing you...Read more...

Intel has established a strong record in the solid state storage space, dating all the way back to 2008 with its debut of the excellent X25-M series of drives. Back then, Intel upped the ante in enthusiast-targeted solid state storage, and they want to do it again with the drive we’ll be showing you here today, the upcoming Intel SSD 730. The new Intel SSD 730 will be the company’s latest flagship consumer-targeted SSD. The drive, however, features technology gleaned from Intel’s experience in data centers, and is actually quite similar to the DC S3500 we reviewed back in June....Read more...

Intel has established a strong record in the solid state storage space, dating all the way back to 2008 with its debut of the excellent X25-M series of drives. Back then, Intel upped the ante in enthusiast-targeted solid state storage, and they want to do it again with the drive we’ll be showing you here today, the upcoming Intel SSD 730. The new Intel SSD 730 will be the company’s latest flagship consumer-targeted SSD. The drive, however, features technology gleaned from Intel’s experience in data centers, and is actually quite similar to the DC S3500 we reviewed back...Read more...

You're going to see a lot of mobile devices announced this week as a result of Mobile World Congress (MWC), but what about the parts inside all those fancy new handsets and tablets? Lest anyone forget about the component side of things, SanDisk today announced the next generation of its iNAND Extreme embedded flash drive (EFD), which it's billing as the fastest, thinnest, and most sophisticated embedded storage product the company has ever built. SanDisk says its newest 19nm iNAND Extreme will lead to more advanced Android devices. There's a new architecture at work here, one that includes a unique...Read more...

We suspected that a deal was imminent, and now the details are being made public. OCZ, a company that engrossed gamers and power users for years with wicked-fast storage options, recently went bankrupt. Now, however, new life is being breathed into what's left by way of Toshiba. OCZ announced today that an agreement has been inked with Toshiba " to acquire substantially all of OCZ's assets in a chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding for $35M." What this essentially means is that Toshiba is acquiring the solid state drive business from OCZ for a huge discount, which actually may work out well for both...Read more...

Malware writers are a tricky bunch, and if you're not suspicious of every little thing on the Internet, you could fall prey to one of their many tactics, like spoofing software updates. It's not really a new method, though apparently serving up fake updates for Google Chrome and a fake media player update that appears to come from Adobe are popular right now. To make it look even more authentic, both updates are digitally signed by valid VeriSign code signing certificates, ZDNet reports. This isn't the first time malware writers have tapped VeriSign to appear legitimate, though it's not always...Read more...

USB 3.0 offers excellent performance characteristics for external storage, but thumb drives that take full advantage of the standard have been few and far between. According to Silicon Motion, its upcoming SM3267 controller will boost single-channel USB 3 speeds for flash drives to 160MB/s read, 60MB/s write, while simultaneously cutting power consumption and reducing chip complexity. Compared to the older SM3260, the SM3267 chip supports just single-channel flash, but integrates the clock chip onboard. "We are very excited to introduce SM3267, our first crystal-less USB 3.0 solution with integrated...Read more...

It's been quite the week for memory. Last Friday, we learned that Micron absorbed Elpida, and just earlier today, Samsung showed off its "3D" vertical NAND flash memory. Now, we have potentially the most interesting story of them all, coming to us from start-up Crossbar. The company claims that it has developed the world's most advanced non-volatile memory, capable of storing up to 1TB on a single chip. Mind-blowing, to say the least. It gets better. This memory also touts being the most energy-efficient, being able to perform 20x faster than traditional NAND, has 10x the endurance of typical NAND...Read more...